Towards a Global Conceptual History from Below: the Political Thought of Thomas Spence (1750–1814)

Edith Saurer Fonds Towards a global conceptual history from below: The political thought of Thomas Spence (1750–1814) Matilde Cazzola Description of the project My project focuses on the political thought of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), active between Newcastle and London between the 1770s and the 1810s. I studied Spence for my Master’s thesis (2015), and I am now undertaking a book project on him. The intended outcome of my work will be a monograph which develops the most relevant features of Spence’s political reflection and systematizes the original archival materials I collected over the last years in several libraries and archives across the UK. The Edith Saurer Research Grant will help me pursue this project. Spence lived in the so-called “Age of Revolution”, the time span between the late 18th and the mid-19th centuries characterised by recurring revolutionary waves throughout the Atlantic – in British North America, France, Haiti, Latin America, and Europe at large. But this was not only an age of independence movements and rise of constitutional government against absolutism. These were also the years of emergence and strengthening of global capitalism and its interrelated processes: the enclosures of the commons and the pauperization of the commoners, the rise of industrialism and the exploitation of wage labourers, the expropriation and extirpation of colonial natives, and the enslavement of African captives. Borrowing Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology in his celebrated trilogy on the long 19th century, the “Age of Revolution” was at the same time also an “Age of Capital” and an “Age of Empire”: capitalism and imperialism unfolded together on a global scale, gaining momentum in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries.1 This process was neither smooth nor unresisted but had to respond to the counter-strategies and counter-narratives of the expropriated and the enslaved on both sides of the Ocean. Thomas Spence was one of the forgotten spokesmen of these counter-narratives of resistance. Spence is renowned for his “Plan”, a proposal for the abolition of the private property of the land and its common enjoyment, which implied a reorganization of social and political relations on a larger scale: the land, once held in common, would be leased out for cultivation, and the rents paid for the plots of land (the “dividends”) would be redistributed quarterly among the inhabitants; moreover, the state apparatus 1 E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. London: Phoenix Press, 1962; Id., The Age of Capital, 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975; Id., The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987. 1 would be destroyed and replaced with a decentralized parish system. Spence saw the private property of the land as the foundation of social inequalities and political hierarchies and considered the state as allied with the oligarchy of the landlords against the poor and the landless: for this reason, the abolition of private landownership would entail a dismantlement of state apparatus. This social and political transformation would be accomplished by the revolutionary struggle of the “swinish multitude”. This expression was coined by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to contemptuously refer to the poor and dispossessed fourth estate who jeopardized the stability of the propertied establishment, and was recovered by Spence as his privileged political actor and interlocutor.2 In Spence’s view, this struggle would not be confined to Britain, but would spread worldwide: the Plan would involve a complete reshaping of modern social order both at home and in the colonies overseas. Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750 to a poor family. After being expelled from the local Philosophical Society for proposing his Plan of abolition of private landownership, he moved to London in the early 1790s, where he soon engaged in radical thinking, writing, and publishing: he joined the working-class organization London Corresponding Society and opened a bookstall in Chancery Lane, and later a bookshop in Holborn, where he sold banned treatises by other thinkers, minted subversive tokens, and printed his radical pamphlets, songbooks, and periodicals (included the anthology Pigs’ Meat, in which he cheaply reprinted excerpts from classic political authors). Spence’s name was well known to state authorities: during his London years, he was beaten, threatened, hindered in his activity of author and bookseller, arrested without trial, and imprisoned several times. Interestingly, Spence’s problems with justice were not due to his practical political activism, but to his intellectual work: what was most alarming to the authorities was the propagation of Spence’s Plan in the cheapest formats available among the members of the “swinish multitude”. Thomas Spence is a neglected figure in the history of political thought. As he claimed for the commons while England was undergoing industrialization, he has traditionally been considered as an eccentric and anachronistic radical. Even if, over the last years, some historians of the Age of Revolution have been reassessing his importance for radical history and Atlantic history, Spence’s stature as an all-accomplished political thinker still has to be fully appreciated. In fact, Spence esteemed himself a scholar, an educator, and a philosopher. At his trial at the Court of King’s Bench in 1801, he proudly vindicated his dignity as a political theorist: “I stand here Gentlemen […] not as a mere bookseller vending the works of others […], but as an original legislator for having formed the most compact system of society on the immovable basis of nature and justice”.3 He considered himself as the main inventor of the “chief of sciences: the 2 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. by L.G. Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 79. 3 T. Spence, The Important Trial of Thomas Spence (1803), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. by H.T. Dickinson. Newcastle- upon-Tyne: Avero, 1982, 92-104, 94. 2 science of the Rights of Man”.4 Thanks to his radical and original political reflection, Spence was able to gather several disciples around him, the self-proclaimed “Spenceans”, who after the death of their mentor in 1814 founded the Society of Spencean Philanthropists in London. Although almost unknown today, Spence was famous – and notorious – in his own days, and not only among radicals: also the advocates of the established order were aware of the political and theorical relevance of his Plan. State authorities considered Spence as a serious political thinker and organizer, as his recurrent arrests, detentions, and trials demonstrate. His followers were deemed no less dangerous. The Spenceans became the indefatigable orators and agitators of the radical London underground through the 1810s. They contributed to the enduring vitality of Spence’s Plan after 1814, by chalking subversive messages on the walls throughout London: the pamphleteer and Member of Parliament William Cobbett reported in his Weekly Political Register in 1816 that “we have all seen, for years past, written on the walls, in and near London, these words, ‘SPENCE’s PLAN’”.5 Between 1816 and 1817, the Spenceans organized three riots at Spa Fields, while in February 1820 they plotted the Cato Street Conspiracy, an attempt to murder the whole British Cabinet during a ministerial dinner in London. In 1817, an Act of Parliament banned all political clubs that referred to Thomas Spence, making Spenceanism the only political ideology to have ever been outlawed by the British Parliament.6 The fame of Thomas Spence and the Spenceans was confirmed by the prominent German romanticist Adam Müller. In an short pamphlet titled Spences philanthropischer Plan, Bibelgesellschaften und Gemeinschaft der Güter (1816), Müller remarked that the Spencean doctrine had been made “extremely popular under the pressure of misery” across the British Isles, and almost unwillingly acknowledged that Spence was no less sophisticated than other modern “political philosophers”: those philosophers “are stronger on the practical side, while Master Spence is more consistent on the theoretical side; they are more fashionable, but he is ultimately superior”.7 Remarkably, also Karl Marx was acquainted with Spence’s thought: he mentioned him with admiration in Theories of Surplus-Value (1863) as the “deadly enemy of private property in land”.8 With my project, I want to explore the path suggested by Adam Müller: I am going to provide Thomas Spence with a new theoretical centrality, by treating him as a “political philosopher” worthy of the name. I do not only intend to bring back to light a neglected but important representative of the history of British political thought. I also want to demonstrate the relevance of Spence’s Plan, by dismantling the 4 T. Spence, The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (1798), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, 54-69, 58. 5 W. Cobbett, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. London: 14 December 1816, vol. 41, 749. 6 K. Armstrong and A. Bonnett (eds.), Thomas Spence: The Poor Man’s Revolutionary. London: Breviary Stuff, 2014, 2. 7 A. Müller, “Spences philanthropischer Plan, Bibelgesellschaften und Gemeinschaft der Güter”. Deutsche Staatsanzeigen, Leipzig, Voss 1816-1818, Bd. 2 (1817), 347-366, 355, 359 (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek – Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum). 8 K. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value (1863). Moscow: Progress

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